OMG the dreams I had. They're pretty interesting, well to me at least, so if you want to wade through them I'll post a bit here and use the Live Journal cut tag to spare everyone the big wad of text. There is a lot of gothic Southern ghostliness and racism going on.

I am in a new apartment with Beau and a housekeeper and all of our cats. We are waiting for our house to be remodeled. It's very New Orleans Southern in style and I really like it. Perhaps it was all part of one beautiful big house at one time and has been broken up into several units for rental. Ours is a two story townhouse sort of thing.

I have an office I like. Design wise it's very modern and retro at the same time, not my usual taste, lots of sleek purple velvet furniture and art. I remember something about the shape of the desks. I sit low by my computer, on the floor, on carpet I think. I'm horny and want to go find my Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator.

Beau and his friends are playing, laughing and yelling, outside. There are other kids running around this courtyard, old fashioned kids, in coveralls with Southern accents. Boys out of time, with little pellet guns, who shoot at birds for pleasure, menacing, angry, little troublemakers.

All of these apartments sort of face in towards each other. There are widows walks around the tops of them, and each unit has it's own walled in private gardens. From the top walk I can just peek inside the gardens of my neighbors. They all have beautiful floral container gardens, with flowers that are so pretty and colorful. I hear a woman and a man arguing. Each one is accusing the other of calling out for Esther. "Who the heck is Esther," they're saying. "Well, I don't know, you're the one whose been yelling her name." "No, you are!" So I shyly say, "I know an Esther, she's my housekeeper." The woman comes out and we start talking. We talk about the apartments and flowers. She asks how much rent I'm paying, I say two thousand per month. I realize that I like this place so much that I want to keep it, even when my house is finished, but I know I can't afford to.

As I explore the house it grows and becomes more antebellum, larger, older, more gothic in feel. The neighbors seem hostile and threatening playing cards and games next door. I go downstairs and towards the back of the house. The cats follow me and I feel protective of them.

My bathroom, or one of the bathrooms is so odd. The toilet is just a round toilet bowl in the middle of the tiled bathroom floor, round as opposed to the regular shape. The flush pull is hanging from a chain in the middle of the ceiling.

I need to get something, maybe the vibrator, and get out of here. There is a woman who is urging me to hurry up, get out of here, get back upstairs to current time, come back to my office. But the cats are being naughty, they want to see the bathroom too, they keep finding ways in and every time I kick two or three out, another two or three manage to get in. One of them is submerged in the toilet, looking down the drain, I fish him out and he scatters away.

Suddenly Scott is here. I'm so relieved to see him. I start telling him about this weird place. I'm certain it's haunted, and I have mixed feelings of terror and dread but am intrigued at the same time. The cats run around a corner and are kind of in a covered alley or passway that leads around the side of the house. They are playing with things, and come rolling down this hilly alley covered in tubing, and tires, and things. They look really funny. We follow them around the side of our spooky house, and there are all kinds of neat toys that have been abandoned here, by the people who sold us the house. There are neat game boards, and boxes with cool graphics, and backgammon and checker games. Scott doesn't understand why I want to save these things, get them out of the way of rain and the weather. He thinks they're junk.

The backgammon game is laying open with all of these lovely, clear, amber colored pieces spread out all over the floor. I am putting them back in their little fold up box, when I hear the neighbors next door. They say insulting colloquial things to us that we don't really understand.

We go round the back of this building, in the area between the neighbors property and ours. I'm still not sure yet what is ours and what is theirs. It appears as if they have been making use of our property, in the absence of any owners, for a while now and they resent our intrusion. There are things nailed up to the back of this house, little vintage vignettes of things. Old things that had belonged to the owners, that the neighbors have kind of been looting and then bringing back here to play with.

I'm fascinated by all of this, but Scott wants me to just pass it by. There is a kind of briefcase, or green box of some kind, that's nailed to the wall. It says something like, My Hollywood Diary on it, so I open it up and can see someone had written in it in the twenties and thirties. I'm thrilled about this.

We keep walking, and wind up in this series of rooms at the back of the house. There are so many great old things that have been abandoned here. It's dark and spooky and there are odd noises that seem out of place. A door that was closed, when we passed it before, is suddenly open. I see a shadowy figure of someone dart by. It's a little girl. She can't be more than ten or eleven. She's black and has her hair in braids. She wants to know what we're doing here. I explain that this is my house now, that I bought it. She wants to know how much I paid, and I tell her one million six hundred thousand, which doesn't seem like a lot for this huge old house, with so many of it's contents left behind.

We follow her into a room where she has been playing. She has been gathering toys from various places in the house and bringing them here. There are wonderful, old books, and dolls, and wind up toys. My favorite are a stack of books with lenticular, (3D), covers. I want them so badly, but she is attached to them, so I let her keep them.

Some time has suddenly gone by, and I am reading letters she has written to us, had framed and hung on the walls in this courtyard between our houses. Apparently my husband, but now he is someone other than Scott, has bounced a check to one of the neighbors for ninety dollars. There are a lot of framed notes from the little girl. The one I am reading is a letter to us asking us why we haven't answered her calls or letters, why have we been ignoring her. She is hurt by this.

I follow her in to a neighboring house and find her playing. She is surprised to see me, I ask her if she can forgive me for forgetting her. A woman comes up behind me and I think this is her mother. I sense that she is angry with me. I don't like leaving my back turned towards her, it doesn't feel safe. Things start to sort of get away from me and I am a bit confused. The little girl tells her Mother that we have asked her to come live, "In the big house." I'm thinking, oh, that would be sad to take her away from her family, but I guess we must have offered this, and I really like her, so I would love to have her live with us, as long as her family think this is a good idea.

Then I start to figure something out, there is something else going on, something darker, and more threatening. I think she is a ghost, these are all ghosts, angry, hurting ghosts, and I am caught here, playing out something with them that I don't understand. I learn that the original land or plantation owner fathered this little girl in secret with a housekeeper or cook and never acknowledged or cared for her. He completely rejected her and she must have died or been broken by this. This is the scandal that is at the heart of this sad haunting. I am related to her via this man. He is an ancestor of mine and I am the only living link to this tragedy. These ghosts expect me to do right by her. My loving and embracing her is somehow meant to heal this old wound.

I am back in the haunted house. I am trying to get ready to go with this woman. She is a sister figure, and she wants me to hurry up, things are shutting down and I need to get back somewhere, but I want to dally and explore. I run outside again where there is a woman with parrots. I've seen her before. I ask her if she lived near me, back home in Los Angeles. She says, yes, that she used to live in Westwood, near me, and that perhaps we had met at the park. She likes the South but she is a little bit afraid of the people, all of the rules and social conventions. She sells a special bird seed to supplement her income. I buy a few handfuls and head back to my sister-friend.

On my way back across the alley. I see another woman who lives in one of these time shifting apartment homes. I ask her if she has been seeing ghosts and she says, "Oh, all the time. Come in and I'll tell you about it." I want to but I can't because I have to hurry to get back to the safety of the apartment in current time.

I am moving back through time somehow. I am running with my favorite cat Jake in my arms. I want to get back to where I originally was in time. I need to get back to the safety of the apartment. There are children who are trying to shoot us and I have to make it back without their seeing us. My husband has hired them to shoot at whoever has been stealing our cats and children. They have mistaken me for this person and are after me.

I see a man through some bushes up ahead. He has a gun and is aiming it at me. I duck into an alleyway. I turn in to the first store looking for help. Instantly I realize my mistake. I've walked in to a police precinct in the deep south with two hayseed deputy sheriffs. These are racist, scary, country hicks. One of them looks at us and says, "Lookey here what's jest walked right into our hands, a nigger." They're referring to my cat Jake, they think he's black, and they want to kill him. I tell them that, no he's just a cat. They say, "We've had people try to fool us before about this," and then they point to another little Devon Rex who is sitting on a window sill. I tell them "Well, yes someone must have told you this before because, obviously this is a Devon Rex cat and not an African American human being." One of them says, "No it aint, it's a nigger and we're gonna kill it." I'm trying to protect Jake while the other deputy sheriff grabs the little kitten and is going to behead her with an ax. I run towards him and put my hand in the way and am about to lose my hand when I wake up.